One thing old and one thing new

As a cognitive psychologist, I love listening to the language quirks in Finn's everyday chatter. He makes the kinds of classic mistakes when talking that, when you know what you're looking for, you can see are signs of his language skills getting better. The errors themselves show that his language is developing and becoming more like that of an adult. For example, he tends to over-extend his past tense "ed" rule. One of my favorites is when he is playing a video game where his character gets knocked over or out by another character he says "He falled me down." This is two errors in one: 1) the error of saying "falled" instead of "fell", which means he is internalizing the rule about past tense and extends it to irregular verbs that it doesn't belong with (some cognitive psychologists don't believe kids have an actual internal rule, though, but it's too complicated to go into the actual theory here... and I suppose anyone who's not a dorky cognitive psychologist, like myself, wouldn't find it very interesting. It really is a cool theory, though!), and 2) the error of using "fall" as a transitive verb (I don't actually know what this means linguistically). He makes the "ed" error with some other words, but I find this phrase the cutest. He's usually not upset-sometimes he says it with a bit of resignation, but always with a perfectly calm acceptance of that aspect of the game.

That was the old... he's been doing that for a while. Here's the new. The other day Finn was able to, for the first time I've been able to catch it, really explain how he was feeling deep down in a way that didn't just rely on a standard label, like "I'm sad" or "I'm mad". He tends not to be able to explain why he gets upset. The actual process of getting upset sort of short-circuits his thinking, I believe, so that by the time you get him calmed down, he doesn't have the ability to tap into what the problem had been at that time, at least not in words. Well, the other day Finn and his daddy went to the basketball court and brought his little basketball with them. When they came back, Finn was very upset (I could hear him crying about a block and a half away, since the front door was open). His daddy was also very upset; they were both clearly very frustrated, and it escalated into a time-out for hitting or some such. At any rate, I didn't get a chance to talk to Finn about it right away, but his daddy told me the gist of the story:

They had been playing basketball at the court, which had turned into Hubby shooting the ball and Finn fetching it after (Finn has little patience with shooting the ball himself for very long since he can't come close to the basket, so he likes to watch his daddy shoot). Then they started kicking the ball around. They were playing a soccer-esque game of kick, where they would race to the ball together, each trying to reach it first. Hubby would reach it first most of the time and kick it away from Finn, at which point Finn would laugh and run after it again. It was a perfectly happy game, and there was no gradual sign of Finn becoming upset. Suddenly he just sat down and wouldn't play and got sulky and eventually started to cry (or maybe that didn't start until after Hubby picked him up and started to carry him home). The key points being that Finn seemed to be enjoying the game of kick even though it essentially was like a game of "keep-away" from him, and that he didn't gradually melt down but suddenly was upset.

When I heard the story, I suspected that Finn had been frustrated because his daddy kept kicking the ball away from him. Hubby is not really into the "let him win because he's little" philosophy, but I should also say that I'm sure he was right that Finn seemed to be having a perfectly happy time throughout all of this. It wasn't a case of daddy being a meanie... it's just that Finn didn't realize he was frustrated until it was too late. I have that kind of frustration/anger myself sometimes; it boils up so gradually that you don't even notice it until you're ready to breath fire.

Anyway, typically when I would ask Finn about something like this ("What happened, sweetie? What made you feel frustrated or sad?"), he can't really give me an in-depth sense of his own feelings or thoughts. He usually applies a patented label, or can only pseudo-confirm or refute statements I make myself--like I might say, "Did you get frustrated when the ball kept rolling away?" and he would nod or say "uh-huh". I call this "pseudo"-confirmation because Finn is still inclined to say yes to all of your statements to him, even when they don't really apply to the situation. But I thought I should try to ask him what happened anyway, and this is what he said:

"I didn't kick the ball. Daddy kicked it 2 times, and he kicked it 4 times, and I didn't kick it."

I was floored! First of all, this was several hours later, and Finn doesn't usually retain events in much detail for very long. Secondly, this was an incredibly potent and easily understood rendition of what must have been going on in his head at the time. Nobody asked him specifically what he was thinking at the moment (or if his daddy did ask, I'm sure he was too upset to convey it), so he was telling me now what had been in his head earlier. For some 3-year-olds this might not be a big deal, but Finn doesn't communicate his frustrations verbally very well, so this was really a break-through! I was so amazed and really quite excited at the development that I think this must reflect on his part. I didn't press him further because I didn't want him to feel upset again, and really he had told me everything I needed to know. But I did sneak over to Hubby, who was laying down in the other room, and told him exactly what Finn had said--not to make a big deal of the incident itself, but to show him how Finn was able to get the emotion across.